The SEC filed more than a dozen charges against Binance and CEO Changpeng Zhao on Monday stemming from what the agency called the company’s “blatant disregard” for U.S. law as it grew into the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

In a 136-page complaint, the Wall Street regulator alleged that Binance, its American affiliate, Binance U.S., and Zhao have been operating unregistered U.S. financial institutions, misleading investors about the companies’ risk controls, inflating trading volumes and mixing “billions of dollars of investor assets” and sending them to a third-party entity owned by Zhao.

The case was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

“Zhao and Binance entities engaged in an extensive web of deception, conflicts of interest, lack of disclosure, and calculated evasion of the law,” SEC Chair Gary Gensler said in a statement.

Since the fall of FTX seven months ago, the SEC has orchestrated a sweeping crackdown on the $1 trillion crypto market. But the Binance case represents Gensler’s biggest salvo to date, with the agency taking a broad swing against the exchange and its high-profile CEO. At one point in the complaint, the SEC alleges that customer money was “at Binance’s and Zhao’s mercy.”

Binance denied the SEC’s allegations in a blog post, including the claim that customer assets at Binance.US were at risk. The company said it was “disheartened” by the SEC’s decision to bring the case to court after the two sides had been engaged in talks about a settlement.

“While we take the SEC’s allegations seriously, they should not be the subject of an SEC enforcement action, let alone on an emergency basis,” the company wrote in the post. “We intend to defend our platform vigorously.”

The SEC’s charges further complicate an already murky outlook for Binance in Washington. U.S. authorities have been circling for months, and in March the Commodity Futures Trading Commission sued Binance over a series of similar charges resulting from the exchange’s operations in the U.S.